


Mind Made Up. 1/1.

by punky_96



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-18
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-10-20 15:57:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10665987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punky_96/pseuds/punky_96
Summary: For the Erica_callie challenge “Warning Signs” by Coldplay.  Uh, not happy fluffy, just reflective I guess.  Someone drove away, thought about it all, and had a choice to make.  Story is deliberately a cliffhanger.  Note at the end shares why...





	Mind Made Up. 1/1.

  
__****  
Mind Made Up  
  
     The road ahead was long but somehow the road behind her back to where she came from was longer.  When had it happened that she had stopped looking back and focused on what was ahead of her?  When had she turned her back on the truth that she could feel in her skin?  Her every breath and heartbeat screamed at her to go back, but like raindrops on the windshield she flipped a switch and wiped them away.  Her body could not speak for itself—that was how she had landed face first in the trouble that clung to her and changed her forever.  
  
     Her body had tasted HER lips and like a gateway drug, she had been insatiable for her taste from that moment on.  She had followed her cravings along her jawline, trailed her tongue along that sweet spot behind her ear, whispered the truth of her desire over soft skin, and then she had plunged down her body sucking on her pulse point and hardened nipple on her way down and down, all the way down until her tongue at last tasted the wet desire that had pooled there for her.  
  
     This had been her undoing.  
  
     The gateway drug, the gateway taste, the gateway to her soul…  
  
     The gate closed silently behind her like HER legs wrapped around her neck ankles locking together over her back.  Yes, she had crossed through the gateway and over that threshold like any other virgin.  Naïve, blindly innocent and enraptured in the mystery, in the finding of clues and solving of the puzzle she was unaware of the mad-crazed-demented-creature lurking in the shadows for her.  She had not paid attention to any of the warning signs.  She had not known that she would be lured with her defenses down.  It was not until her body was shaking and she screamed her release that she would realize that she had opened her soul and left her heart.  In the harsh light of day she felt the damage before she had seen it.  She felt the raw edges where her reality used to be and could see the tatters her denial had been left in.  
  
     The dashes of the road rose up and passed by ticking off the hours and keeping time with her failing heartbeats.  They blurred after the hours set in, but she pushed on.  In the past she had done 48 or even 72 hours at the hospital, so this should be nothing new to her.  She could push through this—this was the fight of her life—her escape from what kind of personal hell she could not imagine.  
  
     Pulled over at a gas station she found herself at an unnamed unmarked point on the map.  The road was almost gravel from years of disrepair and no one around to complain about it.  There were four pumps, but she doubted seriously that they ever ran empty in this town that fears sunset and sat on a fault-line.  A bare bulb lit up the awning over the gas station and it was just dark enough to see how forlorn that made this tiny outpost of civilization.  She got her road grade coffee and pumped her gas thankful for a clean enough bathroom and no one to see her cry.  
  
     The mad-crazed-demented-creature lurking in the shadows was no beast, but it was just as dangerous.  Just as it was no beast, she had to admit it was not her lover either, but it was instead her own fears and weaknesses made flesh and come to haunt her.  It was perhaps all three of those things: a mad-crazed-demented-creature of doubt, her lover turned heart breaker, and her inner fears personified.  She remembered from her distant literature classes that the conflict could be as much external as internal and that outside forces often had a role to play.  Gripping the steering wheel in her white knuckles she wished she could remember, so that she could turn on the light of analysis in her own mind and solve the conflict there.  
  
     The warning signs were clear enough.  Two lovers who had never done this before, not really, not with the genuine hope of it working and the more than healthy fear that it wouldn’t.  Two lovers who at the first sign of desire had been unable to be in the same room let alone admit their life-changing desires.  Two lovers that were only human, and as such could hurt each other as much on accident as on purpose.  There it was laid out clear as a diagram—two lovers who couldn’t do this.  Two lovers who had succumbed to an addiction of sorts and then had disgusted themselves on what it had turned them into:  Lesbian, Door Mat, Cheater, Weak.  
  
     The problem was that by the time you missed the warning signs and finally had to start picking up the pieces, then you realized that you had also missed the good part.  You missed paying attention to that first kiss, that last kiss—because you were worried about what that kiss meant and you were not sure that you wanted another kiss even though you craved it like the most dangerous drug in the world.  So you weren’t really in the moment and didn’t see it for what it was when you traced your tongue along her lower lip and her breath caught in her throat for you.  It didn’t even register that you should take your time to savor the curve of her hip under your tongue or the shiver you caused over her whole body from your fingertips alone.  Life flew by like those dashes in the middle of the road and then you realized that you didn’t see the warning signs and that you blew right on by the good parts.  If you were lucky your memory caught what it could before you saw the bubble as it burst, before you built a house of cards that would crash down on you.  
  
     Even though you realized that you were the one not paying attention and you realized that you had a hand in the blame because her tongue was mapping you and her touch was sending you over the edge—even though you realized all of that—you looked for excuses of why it didn’t work.  You cast out hooks and hoped for a lifeline that it wasn’t your fault because this was already painful, and if you have to turn that light of analysis on yourself, then it might just destroy you.  
  
     Sitting in your car crying on your steering wheel on the gravel of a one-pump station town you had to decide to get back on the road.  You had to decide to continue to follow the sun until it came up far away, or if you would head backwards through the darkness the way you had just come and return to the gateway—and pull her to you, or let her draw you in once again.  Sitting in the growing darkness with a chill easing through your bones—you quietly sobbed and stifled your moans, but you would like to tell her the state you’re in, to shout it in your loudest tones.  The things you would want to tell her and to ask her rattled around in your head.  ‘Why wasn’t I looking for a warning sign?  Why weren’t you?  Or were we too busy looking for them, when we should have paid attention to the good parts that we let pass us by?  Were we looking down instead of learning to fly?’  
  
     And sitting there with more miles away between you than miles closer you realized that the truth was you missed her.  You might miss her like a drug, but there was something else beyond that—you knew in the quietest part of your heart that she was more than a foolish addiction.  Before you had ever licked her salty sweat from her skin in the heat of passion, you were drawn to her because she made you a better person when you were with her.  You were funnier, friendlier, more talkative, and it was okay to be alive for the first time in a long time.  The physical had brought it all out, no doubt.  However the passion deep in those eyes and the pain was just too great to imagine when it was met with rejection.  The rejection of ‘I can’t do this,’ or ‘I slept with Mark,’ or ‘Okay (I don’t care enough to be upset),’ or ‘I don’t even know you.’  
  
     The nail was in the coffin.  The door was slammed closed on your fingers.  There were enough miles between you that you finally felt safe enough to stop, safe enough to let your guard drop, and then in the dark of the moment as you drove away you realized that leaving in that way was its own warning sign.  Leaving without closure carved a warning in the bedrock of your souls.  Whether it was leaving emotionally face to face in the moment of confession or whether it was the turning of a back—it was still left incomplete the warning laid down that it would not let you rest whether you stayed in silence or left under the cover of the night.  Neither of you would be able to escape this warning.  
  
     Incomplete.  It wasn’t over even if it was over, not this way.  This warning should have been clear whether you were coming or going—you would haunt her and she would you, if not in person, then in dreams and day dreams, and sudden flashes of mental or physical memory.  A perfume caught on the breeze.  A phrase only she used.  A smile that was only for you.  A brush of skin against yours that reminded you of her, but left you cold now.  Suddenly it was very clear that the not-ending ending would haunt you as sure as that mad-crazed-demented-creature would lurk in the shadows waiting for you to slip up again.  
  
     She was an island, her body laid out for you to explore, her mind and senses open to you—to let you discover with our eyes, fingertips, tongue.  All of her for all of you.  Better than an eye for an eye, and much more pleasant and pleasurable.  Except that you missed the warning signs, did not read the labels and overlooked the fine print.  
  
     And now you had become road weary because you should not have let her go.  You should not have let her let you go.  The saddest part was that you couldn’t really remember when she first started to slip away.  Was it the morning that she declared her love?  Was it the moment that she agreed to be scared together, but then she embraced it all without her?  Was it the moment she slept with him, or the moment she falsely accepted her back with open arms and a closed heart?  
  
     And driving further and further away all you wanted to do was crawl back.  Crawl back into her open arms.  Because with the level of pain you were in and the magnetic pull you felt back to her, you were sure that they would be—open arms for you.  
  
     Open arms that would make a new bubble around you, a fresh net of safety where the warning signs had all been read and the lessons of missing them the first time had been learned.  Open arms that would caress you and keep the mad-crazy-demented-creature away.  Open arms that would close around you not letting you get away, not letting you let go.  
  
     At the edge of the driveway you sat in your car.  You looked both ways for traffic in the one-pump station town that had decomposed to gravel after years of wear and tear with no one to speak for it.  You looked back and forth and up and down.  You held onto the steering wheel as though it was the stylus of a ouija board and would direct the car for you toward the answer.  But it didn’t choose for you.  So you asked the stars again—‘do I go back or do I go forward?’  
  
     ‘Do I go back and face up to the fact that I am lesbian, cheater, door mat, or weak?’  
  
     ‘Do I go forward leaving this behind, leaving her behind, and begin anew?’  
  
     Then a flash a memory descended of a literature class.  The subject of the study had been Frank Stockton’s “The Lady or The Tiger.”  The man had fallen in love with the semi-barbarian princess and that crime was punishable by death.  The semi-barbarian king left it up to fate however in his sense of generosity.  The prisoner, the princess true love, was to choose between two doors for his punishment.  Behind one door was a ravenous tiger, which would spring out and devour the man and break the princess’ heart.  Behind the other door was a beautiful maiden who would immediately marry the man making him happy the rest of his day and break the princess’ heart.  The princess had found out which door was which and signaled to the man which door to choose.  He trusted her with all his will and followed her advice.  
  
     It was much the same as going back to a painful mess that threatened to devour everything you thought you were on the chance of maybe being happy, or going forward alone to heal alone, but maybe never find love again.  Sitting in the car the choice of the man between the two doors and two fates suddenly came alive.  The problem with this memory was that the story was left at that point in order to stir up discussion about he nature of love and the nature of the semi-barbarian princess as to the how and why of which choice the students thought she had made.  Sitting in limbo this memory was suddenly more frustrating that sitting blankly looking back and forth was.  What use was such a fine memory indeed if it didn’t help?  
  
     Growing more and more frustrated she backed the car into a space and went to buy a candy bar and another coffee.  Once she was on the road there would be no stopping.  Crunching across the gravel the thought occurred to her that everyone in the class was upset about how the story ended and one or two of her classmates had even suggested that maybe there was a third option that the author had just not revealed.  One of the more rambunctious boys in the class had even acted out how he would have scaled the wall of the arena and claimed his lady-love and escaped with her.  Some of the more sedate kids from the front row had turned and told him that was ridiculous.  The arena was not meant to be scaled in that way and they proceeded to explain why, and then a couple of others in the second row had turned and said that the guards would have done away with him on the spot, which was as deadly as choosing the tiger in the first place.  They asked him ‘wasn’t it better to live with the other maiden, than die a pointless death?’  
  
     Mind made up she turned the car onto the road.  The semi-barbarian princess had indicated the right and so that was what she did.  She had read all the warning signs and would be all the wiser for the life that lay ahead of her.  
  
**END**

**Author's Note:**

> The question of her decision was one not to be lightly considered, and it was not for me to presume to set myself up as the one person able to answer it. And so I left it with all of you: Which came out of the opened door—the lady, or the tiger? And which way did our girl go as she turned right onto the road—back to her, or forward alone?
> 
> Or was there indeed some third option like scaling the wall of the arena and escaping?
> 
> ***
> 
> If you ask nicely I can explain some of my thought process here… I’ve been dying to use “The Lady or The Tiger since October ’08 when I was writing “When To Quit”. If you haven’t read it please do. Here’s a link: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/LadyTige.shtml


End file.
